Errors found at Arlington rile McCaskill

Cremated remains dumped into landfills. Tombstones that don’t match gravesites. Five and a half million dollars wasted.

That was the grim picture U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill painted yesterday of what she called “heartbreaking incompetence” and mismanagement at Arlington National Cemetery.

At a news conference in front of the war memorial on the Boone County Courthouse grounds, the Missouri Democrat outlined the steps her Senate oversight subcommittee is taking to investigate possible contracting fraud at Arlington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on contracting oversight will have its first hearing Thursday in Washington, D.C.

The Army inspector general issued a report last month that identified at least 211 discrepancies between burial maps and gravesites at the national cemetery, a site McCaskill called “the country’s most sacred burial ground” for military service members, former presidents and U.S. Supreme Court justices. The investigation revealed unmarked and mislabeled graves and carelessly handled cremated remains.

The report linked a reliance on paper records to burial site errors. McCaskill fears the number of errors could be much higher because only a small section of the cemetery was audited. There are more than 300,000 people interred there with military honors.

“I think the problem is much wider than we know,” she said. “I would be surprised if there weren’t problems like this in every area of the cemetery.”

McCaskill said changes were implemented when the report was issued to prevent future mix-ups. There is an average of one burial every hour at Arlington, she said. She said it was not clear whether graves will be exhumed.

“This is not complicated,” she said. “It is basic scheduling and keeping track of burial remains.” Fixing the management and contracting problems will be easy, she said, but addressing the “heartbreak” of families will be “a much thornier question.”

McCaskill said the Veterans Administration, which operates other cemeteries across the country, had previously offered Arlington officials the digital software system the VA uses to track burials and gravesites, but the Army turned down the offer “and failed this country,” she said.

The government has spent more than $5.5 million on multiple contracts in the past seven years to digitize burial records, but the effort has failed, McCaskill said.

“At the very essence here, you have waste,” she said. “You could have fraud.”

McCaskill said the problem is traced back at least 10 years and is an example of no-bid contracts she said were a staple of the Bush administration.

The list of invited witnesses for Thursday’s hearing includes former cemetery superintendent John Metzler and deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham. Both retired this month after they were forced to resign, and McCaskill said she is not certain if either will show up. An Arlington spokeswoman declined to comment, noting that Army leaders “will provide insight” on Thursday.